Somebody should tell Emmanuel Ogebe to shut up! Ever since his father decided to register the Ogebe family name in the list of the traducers of our hopes and aspirations as a nation, this young man has abandoned his legal profession for the more onerous task of operating a laundromat from his living room in the US. He has been doing more than his fair share of family laundry and must now be told to chill.
Somebody should tell Emmanuel Ogebe to shut up! Ever since his father decided to register the Ogebe family name in the list of the traducers of our hopes and aspirations as a nation, this young man has abandoned his legal profession for the more onerous task of operating a laundromat from his living room in the US. He has been doing more than his fair share of family laundry and must now be told to chill. Last week, he was at his soporific best in The Guardian, sermonizing in a humpty-dumpty drivel entitled “Why Yar’Adua cannot Win”, an article he signed in his capacity as “legal consultant to the Nigerian Government”! A week has nearly elapsed without any serious challenge to his submissions and this has, apparently, emboldened him. He is back with a new set of woolly-headed propositions on why his father’s ignominious ruling is our fault. By ‘our’, I mean ‘we, the people of Nigeria’. Let Emmanuel Ogebe make no mistake: his father, Maurice Iwu, and their dishonorable paymasters in the PDP ruling cabal are ranged against the Nigerian people on opposite sides of History.
In his Guardian treatise, the young Ogebe’s arrogant mission was to explain to Nigerians – ignorant fools in his reckoning – that we have an unsophisticated understanding of the procedures underpinning the elevation of judges to the Supreme Court of Nigeria. He even pushed his lecture to the point of offering grandiloquent comparisons between the American and Nigerian processes and, expectedly, ruled in favor of Nigeria. In essence, his Daddy’s promotion to the Supreme Court was procedurally above board and bla bla bla. Through this poorly disguised sleight of hand and irritating sophistry, Emmanuel Ogebe attempts to reduce the sloppy circumstances surrounding his Daddy’s promotion to technicalities and abstruse legalese.
Since he pretends not to understand issues, let’s make things clear to him. Nigerians’ righteous indignation over his father’s promotion has never been about legalese and yeye technicalities as he imagines. This is about the appearance of wuruwuru, magomago, and ojoro. Since he lives in America and is ever ready to spice his articles with references, footnotes, and endnotes drawn from the American situation, is there anything about the significance of perception and appearance that he does not understand? Perception is everything. What does he make of the presidential pardon of Scooter Libby for instance? Does the President of the United States not have the constitutional powers to pardon? Why has the exercise of that prerogative in the case of Libby drawn so much flak? Why does Barack Obama speak scornfully about Scooter Libby justice? Is it a question of legalese and technicalities? No. It is about the perception of wuruwuru in George Bush’s action. It is about the appearance of magomago in George Bush’s action. Perception. Appearance. I have an assignment for Emmanuel Ogebe. I want him to repeat each word of the two a hundred times and remember them whenever he pretends not to understand what is wrong with his father’s promotion. A man is catapulted to the Supreme Court less than a week to that disgraceful ruling and Emmanuel Ogebe expects us to accept that as one happy, joyful, extraordinary coincidence! It’s a miracle! The result of a painstaking, above-board process. Whenever Emmanuel looks at Nigerians, what does he see tattooed on our foreheads? Mumu?
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What does Emmanuel make of the disquieting murmurs of a certain arrangee affair that has now enabled him to parade himself –and even sign his articles immodestly – as a legal consultant to the Nigerian government? What the heck does that mean anyway? Is he aware of the word on the street about his so-called consultancy? How did he get it? Surely, he is not the only Nigerian legal expert out there in the US? What are his responsibilities? What exactly does he do in Washington for Nigeria? Since we are in the silly season of happy coincidences, what does he make of the fact that when Nigeria needed a legal consultant in America, we miraculously settled for an Ogebe? When will he agree with Nigerians that we are having way too many happy coincidences? How much have I already paid for his services? Afterall, I am a citizen of Nigeria and whatever the looters in Abuja are paying him comes from the national till. I hope he is doing this consultancy on a voluntary basis sha.
Let me spell things out for him, lest he pretends not to know what most Nigerians think about this consultancy business. A good number of ordinary Nigerians happen to believe that there is more to this consultancy business than meets the eye. Sometimes, when a snake slithers with too much grace and swagger, internal limbs may be at work, invisible to the eyes of the snake’s human beholders! Surely, Emmanuel Ogebe cannot fault any Nigerian who believes that the snake of his consultancy crawls on well-calibrated internal limbs. In essence, there is an appearance – ah, that keyword again! – of Nigerian “settlement” in this matter. Does Emmanuel get the drift? Again, it’s all about perception and appearance. Perception. Appearance. We suddenly started hearing about this consultancy as the ruling drew nearer… Emmanuel Ogebe has his own personal laundry to attend to before worrying about Daddy. Let him clear the air about this consultancy before running a Laundromat service for Daddy.
Admittedly, one cannot begrudge Emmanuel the right to defend his father. No one can complain about his right to free speech. We must, however, draw the line for him when his strategies begin to betray a remarkable failure to grasp the mood of the nation. The traducers of our destiny and their children have this cavalier way of riding roughshod over our sensibilities. This is no time for the scions of our oppressors to prance about like peacocks in the public sphere. When Emmanuel Ogebe hides behind flowery prose and legalese to justify the utterly atrocious, he may as well buy salt and pepper, mix the two into puree and rub his concoction on our injury. A failed/wasted generation took over the Nigerian state from the British in 1960, looted it dry, made a failed state out of it, and mortgaged our future.
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The only assignment this tragic generation has ever carried out successfully lies in rigging the Nigerian system permanently in favor of their children. Where and when they stop eating, their children take over. We hear of Gbenga Obasanjo’s astronomical cuts from nepotistic contracts and consultancies, Iyabo Obasanjo’s contracts, Mohammed Babangida’s deals, all kinds of overnight consultancies for the children of those who have trampled on our destiny for so long. While it is perhaps too late for us to do anything about their failed Daddies, we must not take rubbish from their children. One immediate remedial step we can take is to let these children know - especially the garrulous ones among them - that they are not going to take us for a ride like their Daddies. Nonsense and ingredient.
*I wrote this essay in 2008 in reaction to Emmanuel Ogebe’s attempts at whitewashing his father’s role in the legitimation of Nigeria’s worst election – the 2007 Presidential election. At the time, Emmanuel Ogebe published annoying essays in The Guardian. I am republishing mine because the subject of the essay still hasn’t stopped his relentless attempts at rewriting history before our very eyes. Lately, he has been after Saharareporters. Aluta Continua!
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